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Sunday, September 8, 2013

Placebo Science, Treatment, Doctors

How caregivers present and administer treatments has a powerful effect on clinical outcomes --

A Powerful Tool in the Doctor's Toolkit - NYTimes.com: " . . . Suddenly there was a plausible pharmacological mechanism for how placebos work and research in the field flowered. In June, Harvard Medical School and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation held an international medical conference devoted entirely to placebo science. Dr. Kaptchuk describes placebos as not just the traditional sugar pill, but also “everything that surrounds a medical treatment”: how caregivers describe the medication, how they administer it, the expectations they have for the medicine, their tone of voice, their strength of eye contact. In short, everything that doctors and nurses do in an interaction with a patient. This is not especially surprising. Healers and shamans have known intuitively about the importance of this interaction since the dawn of time. . . . "